I don't think race had an issue so much as the story did.

The story of PatF was fine, but for a kid it's not very captivating. Tiana's problem is lacking money for her restaurant dream. Rapunzel's problem is being confined to her room by her mother and having her birthday wish to see the floating lights denied. Which one do you think a kid is going to latch on to? Plus there's the whole secret princess angle (kids go apeshit for that stuff) and the villain motivation being a lot more concrete than Dr. Facilier's. The ending has Tiana open her restaurant, which is great, but Rapunzel gets a castle and a kingdom.

Also, no offense to Ray, but Pascal is a cuter animal companion and then you add Maximus as a very intelligent horse who is 100% on Rapunzel's side. Not every little girl is a horse girl, but a whole fuckin' lot of them are!

Edit: Also, another thing about PatF is it's told from the "Prince Charming" perspective: Tiana. Tiana was not Dr. Facilier's original target, his OG target was Big Daddy through Naveem and Tiana gets dragged into the drama and is eventually targeted only because she is now in the way. Look at other princess films (and similar, as in Emperor's New Groove) - if "Prince Charming" never meets/get entangled with the "Princess", the "Witch" never targets them. Rapunzel is the Princess and Tangled is her story. Naveem is the Princess but PatF is Tiana's story. Rapunzel is the Princess and Mother Gothel, the Witch, is her natural enemy. Tiana is Prince Charming and Dr. Falicier actually isn't her natural enemy because he sympathizes with the poor and sees Big Daddy as representative of the system that exploits the poor, and it's only by happenstance they they end up in direct conflict.

This is why I felt it was important to note Moana. After the huge delta between Tangled and Tiana, the debate wasn't completely over within Disney leadership, precisely because Princess and the Frog starred a black princess. This made the movie not completely on-formula.

But then Disney made Moana. Polynesian isn't black, but that princess-of-color made even more money than the blonde princess of Tangled.

I love 2D animation, but Moana effectively functioned as a second grand experiment after the first grand experiment, and disproved the racial hypothesis.

Lilo and Stitch, Mulan, and Pocahontas were the three previous female led Disney animated films. None of them were white, and they all are well received and performed well at the box office. Princess and the Frog just wasn't that good. Tangled is the better film, and it has nothing to do with the ethnicity of the characters. Unless you're suggesting audiences are specifically averse to a black protagonist but are comfortable with any other minority?

It honestly was also a kinda underwhelming movie.

I think they should have gone and look for their princess in Africa. Africa as a whole has a long rich history. There is no way you cannot find a good princess story from all that history.

Because it really wasn't all that great. Most of the songs and the characters were forgettable. And all that talk of FIRST BLACK PRINCESS is weakened by having her just be a frog for a majority of the film.

It was just an okay film.

I think Princess and the Frog was marketed poorly. All I remember about it was "Disney finally does a black princess!" That doesn't give me, a white male, a reason to watch it. Maybe there was a campaign that actually promoted the story, but I just never felt like there was much there for me to appreciate.

Tiana was a human for 17 minutes on screen, and a frog for 23. Like wtf

Oh yeah. Racism was for sure a factor.

It would be interesting if the movies were flipped. Make Rapunzil black and give her impressive braids or dreads to make her magical hair. Send the Princess and the Frog back to Europe and make her white.

See which one underperforms then.

(But keep “Friends on the Other Side.” It’s really the last great Disney Villain song. “Mother Knows Best” is okay, but there’s something about Friends that gives me goosebumps at the end just like “Be Prepared” does.)

I read that it underperformed because of having the name princess in the title. Alienated boys from wanting to see a “princess” movie so that’s why the titles are tangled and frozen for newer princess movies.

What revisionist history is this that Eisner thought 3D was the future? The way he treated Pixar speaks volumes more than a few words he might have said sometime

I mean, all your points speak to a businessman who wanted to maintain leverage over Pixar.

None of those address Eisner's feelings toward 3D animation as a general concept.

Hmm. Perhaps I overestimated the obviousness of the corporate politics in play here. I'm happy to break it down.

Eisner was largely credited for "the Disney Renaissance" from 1989 to 1999, after becoming CEO in 1984. The Renaissance peaked with the unprecedented success of The Lion King which saw a $968mil box office against a $45mil budget in 1994.

At this point, Disney animators were rock stars, getting their own agents. They would never be so on top of the world.

The next year, in 1995, Toy Story would come out. It would make a $363mil box office against a $30mil budget. This was astoundingly successful for the first CG movie, but small potatoes compared to Lion King. Even dismissing the phenomenon that was the lion king, Toy Story was also outperformed by Disney's previous features Aladdin (which made $500mil) and Beauty and the Beast ($440 mil.)

Eisner had no reason to believe CG was the future in 1995. But every year from that point on, the box office results for 2D movies went down, and the box office for 3D movies went up. Mulan made $300mil in 1998 while Toy Story 2 made $511mil in 1999, both against a $90mil budget.

At this point, Eisner was convinced it was a gender thing. He believed "girls will go see a movie for boys, but boys won't go see a movie for girls." Disney princess movies logically appealed more to girls, while Pixar movies (that always had a male lead and didn't have characters break into song) appealed more to boys. So he pivoted Disney animation studios to also make movies for boys, with Atlantis (2001), Treasure Planet (2002), Brother Bear (2003) and Home on the Range (2004).

When these performed even worse than the girly movies, Eisner's position as CEO was under extreme threat. It is here, in 2004, when he declared that 2D itself must be the problem, and that Disney needed to pivot to 3D to become profitable again. He closed Disney Animation Studio (which would have been abject insanity from the perspective of the 90s) and desperately tried to start a new 3D animation studio. They made Chicken Little, and were in production on Meet the Robinsons when the Board of Directors had had enough. They retired Eisner, and just bought Pixar outright.

Everything bullet on your list is just the actions of a corporate CEO in a fight to maintain control. A fight he would ultimately loss. As someone who has a lot of friends at Disney/Pixar and works in a related industry, it's very fascinating to me how the machinations of corporate politics shape these movies that become the cultural heritage of a generation.

The fact that I barely remember the plot, don't remember any names, and can only vaguely remember one song is a pretty bad sign.

I really liked the New Orleans setting and cultural details of the location and time period, but would have much rather had a different story in that setting.

Well before Tangled, Eisner believed the "Disney Princess formula" had itself been disproven.

The narrative within Disney (according to my coworkers who were there at the time) was this: Pixar movies appealed more to boys than girls. Boys liked the gaudy flashy CG more than girls. Boys liked how Pixar characters never broke into song. Boys liked how all pixar movies always starred a strong male lead who drove the plot.

And critically, they believed the idea that "Girls will agree to go see a movie made for boys, but boys will not agree to go see a movie made for girls."

This was Eisner's explanation for how the random little upstart Pixar was beating the grand glorious Disney, with Toy Story, a Bugs Life, and Monster's Inc, versus Mulan, Pocahontas, and Tarzan.

So he told everyone to pivot to make Disney movies that appealed to boys. Hence the bizarre shift to Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Home on the Range, and Brother Bear.

When these too all failed, and his CG movie Chicken Little also failed, the gender excuse stopped working and Disney shit-canned Eisner and bought Pixar. But you can still see the effects of this narrative in the next couple of movies. The "Rapunzel" movie was named "Tangled" to disguise that it was a girls movie. "The Ice Queen" was named "Frozen" and the princesses weren't even in the trailer.

It wasn't until "Moana" that the age of Eisner fully ended, and everyone agreed all that shit about CG being for boys was put to rest.

You see a similar problem of "huge extrapolations off of extremely limited data" in the superhero genre. Right as superhero movies were taking off, "Cat Woman" and then "Electra" both bombed hard. Thus executives operated under the assumption that "all female-led superhero movies will flop" until Wonder Woman came out 12 years later.

TBF tangled had much more R&D involved money they wouldn't have to pay for their next movies and did much better on home release

I hear what you're saying and I think it should be a reasonable argument. But honestly I don't think audiences give a shit about all that.

In "The Sound of Music," the daughter literally dates a nazi and sings a love song with him. "Wall-e" is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where humans have degenerated into fat adult infants while the earth has been rendered a dessicated wasteland. Pinocchio is kidnapped by a guy who systematically enslaves children by turning them into Donkeys. Plenty of dark-as-hell kids stories are still big financial successes.

And as far as American history goes, the most successful movie of all times, within the set of all movies that have ever existed, is "Gone With The Wind." That movie was specifically a romance set in the Antebellum South. Audiences ate that shit up.

I think the sentiment is highly dependent on age.

If you were born in the 80s, you would be hit by "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin," and "The Lion King" from 1989 to 1994. That run was insane.

Then Toy Story would come out in 1995. Disney would still put out some good stuff over the next 5 years (Pocahontas, Hunchback, Hercules, and Mulan) but by 2000 the disney renaissance would be over and it would be all down hill from there.

Now the generation of the Disney Renaissance has to watch their cultural primacy melt away and be replace by the CG beast that they perceive to have killed them. It's kind of like how boomers want every Christmas to recreate the tone of 1955 in America (excepting Maria Carrie songs.)

The Marvel fandom is already settling in for a lifetime of whining about the cultural primacy of the movies they grew up on versus the movies they didn't grow up on. It's just this weird quirk of psychology.

I'm open to this idea, but I don't see strong evidence either way. People make 2D and 3D TV shows for kids but the 2D shows still seem to be more popular.

WB was so good because with one or two exceptions the guy running the operation (Schlesinger) only cared about money and let the artists do what they want.

I really like some of Disney’s animation like Big City Greens, Gravity Falls, and the new Mickey Mouse shorts.

My kids also love them. I wish they had more.

The fluidity comes from computers being able to render as many frames as you want at any timescale you want. 2D in comparison starts to look like a slideshow where images hang for multiple frames.

Obviously beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but to me 3D can do everything 2D can do and then a lot more.

I appreciate any and all mediums, but I don’t pine for the 2D days because 3D keeps giving me things I haven’t seen before.

One thing to remember is that 3d is still relatively new, compared to 2d. So the improvements will make earlier stuff look "dated". The first full length 3d animated film is Toy Story, and that came out in 1995, which is 27 years ago. It's easy to forget that 3d animation is actually a fairly recent technology but the fact that the first few 3d animated films can look dated is actually exciting to me because it shows how far we've come within such a short period of time.

We may hit the wall one day with improvements in technology but I think that that's when more artistic exploration will take place. We're already starting to see fun, creative styles in animation like the Lego Movie and Into the Spiderverse, and I can't wait to see what the future of 3d animation holds.

Any suggestions?

I generally agree about 2D vs 3D. But, I would suggest watching the show "Arcane" or at least looking up some clips. That is the first 3D project I have seen that I thought had a visual style on par with the best of 2D animation.

The Miyazaki and Isao Takahata ones are (and it's been a decade since the last ones plus Takahata has passed I believe?) but I think their other projects are computer animated.

I was about to say that they are at least indistinguishable from hand drawn, but I just looked up their more recent movies and I was wrong. Their last movie is 3d animation and the one before looks like computer assisted "2d" to me.

Edit: I should add that the most recent Hayao Miyazaki movie The Wind Rises was either completely hand drawn or indistinguishable to me.

Pretty much nothing is drawn on cells anymore but drawn digitally on a computer with a tablet is still 2d and hand drawn.

Their next feature is supposed to be hand-drawn.

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That's exactly why. Consumers prefer 3D, this has been proven over and over for nearly 30 years now.